Personalize emails & SMS with Subscriber Custom Fields

Personalization is a great way to engage with your subscribers. You can personalize the subject line, "From" name and content of your email or your SMS by inserting personalization tags based on subscriber field data. When your email or text is sent we dynamically change these tags to display information relevant to each recipient.

Tags Types

• Personalization tags are based on subscriber custom fields, which is the information about your recipients.
• Special tags are the quick access to the links for the Unsubscribe, Subscriber Preference Center and the Web version, which is mainly used in the email template editor.
• Company tags are the data related to the client. This would enable you to insert your company information into the emails or SMS campaigns.
• Date tags are a quick way to insert current date into your email or SMS campaigns.
• Revenue tags are used in templates that are used in the Automated Journeys and gives you access to the Revenue data you provide when the Revenue events are triggered.

Personalization Tags

All personalization tags are based on subscriber custom fields, which is the information about your recipients that is recorded with your subscriber list. Every time you create a subscriber list, we create some basic fields for the list like name, address, email address and mobile,  but you can add up to 50 more custom fields.

Each field has a personalization tag associated with it — for example, the personalization tag for the email address field is [email]. When new custom fields are created, their personalization tag is automatically generated. 

Personalization tags only work well if you have the corresponding data for recipients. For example, you can be sure the [email] personalization tag will work every time, because a person's email address is a mandatory part of signing up to a subscriber list, or if you have a SMS list the [mobile] personalization tag will work every time.

To use other personalization tags, you'll need to collect data through your subscribe form, import data from external systems, or try using our API.

You can still use personalization if some recipients don't have data associated with a field. Fallback terms can be used as a substitute for any subscriber data that may not be recorded for some recipients.

Fallback Terms

By default, personalization tags include the text fallback, followed by an equals sign. A fallback term is a word, or words, that will be substituted in if you don't have the relevant data. It can be any plain text word or phrase.

Fallback terms aren't mandatory, but you should use them wherever you can. If you need to leave a fallback term blank, just leave the tag as is, with nothing following the equals sign. Alternatively, you can remove the ,fallback= from the tag, so [firstName,fallback=] would become [firstName].

Where to use Personalization Tags

You can use personalization tags at multiple points throughout the campaign creation process.

Email Content

Personalization tags can be typed directly into Transactional Emails or Texts. When using our email template builder, you can use personalization tags by clicking Insert on the toolbar, then select Personalization.

SMS Content

When you create a SMS campaign, you can click Insert Tag above the text field, as shown here:

Personalization in web versions of your campaign

When you view the web version of your campaign from a test email, you will see a generic version that uses fallback terms rather than subscriber-specific data. However, when you send the campaign, each subscriber will see their own customized web version with their personalizations applied.